


Coming Home

by lamardeuse



Category: Smallville
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-22
Updated: 2010-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:35:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamardeuse/pseuds/lamardeuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Futurefic. Clark and Lex deal with the loss of a loved one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Home

When Clark’s mother dies, he’s halfway around the world rescuing a school full of children trapped after the building collapses in an earthquake. When he gets back to Metropolis he turns on the television and sees Lex Luthor in a charcoal suit standing on the back platform of his campaign train, talking about “a great loss to the country” and Clark knows immediately who he’s talking about, because for the first time in years Lex looks human.

The light on his answering machine is blinking, but he can’t listen to it, doesn’t want to hear the tears in Chloe’s voice or the sympathy in Lois’. He heads for the bathroom and takes a shower, turns the water up as hot as it will go and stands under the spray until the tap runs cold, and when he comes out his phone’s ringing. He debates letting that one go to the machine too, then changes his mind just as the last ring is cut short.

“Clark Kent.”

There’s a pause at the other end of the line, and Clark sucks in a breath. “Clark. I’m sorry.” Lex’s voice, the polished tone barely concealing a rough, weary edge. The connection crackles, and Clark dimly recalls the name of the train’s location scrawled across the bottom of the screen, a small town in North Carolina.

“Thanks,” Clark says, because even after all that’s happened, he deserves that. “I – uh – I just heard.”

“You – ” He can practically hear Lex scowling at some cowering minion. “You weren’t notified?”

Clark glances at the still-blinking light. “In a way. I was – I wasn’t in the country.”

“God,” Lex breathes. “If I’d known, I would never have spoken publicly – ”

“No, it was fine,” Clark says. “You did – fine.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Lex says, sounding relieved. “I wasn’t sure – ”

He remembers sundrenched afternoons in the kitchen, Lex strangely awkward and young in the presence of his mother’s easy acceptance. It hurts him to think about how many times he took his family’s love for granted, when Lex would have given anything to have parents like his. In some ways, it’s fitting that Lex was the first to eulogize her.

“Thanks for calling, Lex,” Clark says, because he has to get off the phone _now_, “I have to – ”

“Yeah,” Lex agrees, and he doesn’t sound any better than Clark, they’re both breaking and they’ve forgotten how to put one another back together. Come to think of it, maybe they never really learned. “Goodbye, Clark.”

After he’s hung up, he sits on his couch, eyes squeezed shut, though he can still see the damned light blinking through his eyelids.

  
Lex doesn’t come to the funeral, which surprises him at first until he thinks about it. He’s spent the last week feeling like he’s sixteen again, and he forgets Lex isn’t there anymore, waiting to step from the shadows to help him weather the latest crisis.

It shocks the hell out of him to realize the hole that opened up inside him four days ago is still growing. All during the service, as he watches the coffin being lowered into the ground, during the wake where his mother’s neighbors watch him with kind eyes and offer him sandwiches with the crusts carefully cut off, he’s losing a battle he doesn’t have any idea how to fight. He knows how to use his fists, his strength, his speed to achieve a goal, but there are no objectives to be achieved, no lives to be saved here.

_The life you save may be your own_, Clark thinks, semi-hysterically, as Mrs. Winthrop smiles at him in the way that every farm woman in Kansas knows, and Chloe is hovering somewhere nearby and he can’t _breathe_, he has to –

He makes it to the barn, where everything’s been kept exactly as it was, a shrine to his not-so-innocent innocence, and sits down on the couch, head in his hands. He stays there for God knows how long, half expecting to hear the distinctive sound of Lex’s expensive shoes on the stairs, but no one comes, no one follows.

When he returns to the house, the crowd thins quickly, taking their leave of him like ghosts slipping away into the night. Chloe offer to help him clean up, but Mrs. Winthrop and the others have taken care of the worst of it, and he sends her away with a hug and a kiss and a few tears (hers). Lois didn’t make it to the wake; she was called away on a hot assignment, a murder-suicide of a prominent lawyer and his wife, and Clark envies her the opportunity to lose herself in some stranger’s grief.

He sits in the darkened kitchen for half the night, and the next thing he knows he’s slamming his way out of the house, screen door a gunshot at his back, and then he’s flying east. By the time he locates the train, his carefully pressed suit is in tatters; he lets the shreds fall away, revealing his disguise.

Lex is awake, illuminated by one light in the old-fashioned parlor car at the back of the train; he’s holding a cut crystal glass with about three fingers of brandy in it, his head bowed slightly. When Clark pulls open the back door and walks in, Lex looks up, his eyes red-rimmed and unguarded, and Clark walks right over to him and drops to his knees in front of him, fingers splaying on his warm thighs, seeking contact.

“Clark, what are you – ”

“Shut up,” Clark whispers, “just don’t talk about it, I can’t – don’t you see, you loved her as much as I did, you’re the only one who _understands _– ” and Lex gasps and shuts his eyes but the tears still leak out, and Clark reaches up to stop them with his hands, but he can’t stop this, he can’t fix this, and –

Lex’s breath hitches in a sob, and Clark lets him cry for both of them, his fingertips reading Lex’s grief like Braille.

  
Clark wakes in an unfamiliar bed, Lex sleeping the sleep of the exhausted beside him. He remembers flashes of the night before, a series of discoveries that humbled him. Lex’s skin is soft and stretched thin over lean, powerful muscles, and Clark is more afraid of hurting him than he was of any woman, perhaps because he keeps catching himself trying to get _closer_. Lex’s steady, focused gaze on him the whole time Clark sucks his cock makes Clark feel hot and embarrassed and when it’s over he comes as soon as Lex touches him. Lex’s mouth on Clark’s cock is almost as good as his fingers sliding slickly in his ass, and that’s almost as good as Lex pushing inside him with a slow, deliberate stroke that has Clark simultaneously pleading and cursing when he never would have believed himself capable of either. Lex’s fingers pressed against Clark’s ribs in the darkness, feeling for the incessant thrum of his Kryptonian blood, his whispered, “I always knew,” are, oddly, what causes the tears to finally spill silently onto Clark’s cheeks.

Now, Lex is lying curled on his side, not quite in a fetal position, his arms folded up close to his body and his chest rising and falling shallowly. Clark slides off the bed and visits the well-appointed bathroom, then climbs back onto the mattress and watches Lex until his eyes blink open.

When he sees Clark, his expression goes completely blank, and Clark’s stomach twists. “Lex,” he murmurs, reaching out, but he can’t connect because Lex’s eyes are flat and hard, the man behind them as lost to him as he ever was.

And suddenly Clark knows he can’t let this door keep closing between them, can’t let them keep stumbling over their competing doubts and fears. He’s so goddamned tired of the distances that stand between him and the people he’s dared to care about, and this has always been his greatest distance, his greatest regret.

Lex opens his mouth to speak, but before he can Clark leans down and kisses him slowly, fingers sliding over Lex’s skull to cradle it like the fragile thing it is. Lex’s body stiffens under his, and then he goes completely limp, sagging against the mattress like a sitcom wife with a headache.

Clark draws back, dreading the cold look he knows he’ll see in Lex’s eyes. He doesn’t expect the old big-brotherly mien, the familiar sign that Lex is about to deliver a brief but meaningful sermon on some aspect of human nature. The fact that Clark is not human does not deter him.

“Clark, you’re upset, and you’re missing your mother. It’s understandable that you want to go back to the way things used to be when you were younger – ” and Clark’s grinning now because Lex is trying to put that familiar distance between them and is failing miserably.

Lex trails off, frowning. “Are you even listening to me?”

“I’m hanging on your every word.” Clark leans down and puts his mouth on the dip of Lex’s collarbone, and hears Lex suck in a breath. “I see a problem with your theory, though.”

“What’s that?” Lex asks; it’s obviously an effort for him to keep his voice sounding normal. Clark smiles against his skin and kisses a small, flat nipple next.

“I don’t remember us doing much of this – ” his fingers flutter over Lex’s flat belly “ – when I was younger.”

Stony silence prevails until Clark’s hand strays lower and finds Lex a lot more interested in Clark’s attentions than he’s letting on. Lex makes a tiny, strangled sound then, and his right hand curls into a fist. “Lex?” Clark prompts.

Lex’s eyes open suddenly and Clark reels from the anger that confronts him, burning him in a way that no fire can.

“You think that one kiss from the handsome prince will make it all better, don’t you?” Lex hisses. “You think this is what I’ve been yearning for all these years?”

Clark shakes his head; he can see the tiny lines that have formed at the edges of Lex’s eyes, and Christ, the time they’ve _wasted_. “No,” he murmurs, finally figuring it out as he says it, “but I think maybe it’s what I’ve been yearning for.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Lex snaps, and Clark knows then that he’s got a lot of work ahead of him. He’s got something to fight for, a goal to reach, an objective to achieve.

A life to save.

Maybe two.

He takes one of Lex’s fists in his hand and gently unfolds the fingers, then splays it over his own chest. Lex’s eyes widen, unprotected for a full second this time, and Clark feels a surge of triumph that’s a bigger high than red K.

“Maybe not right now,” he says, smiling in a way every Kansas farmboy knows. “But then again, I’ve never been afraid of a little hard work.”

**Author's Note:**

> First published September, 2006.


End file.
